


when roads disappeared i followed the rivers

by dollylux



Series: Invisible Boy [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Reunions, Series Finale, Soulmates, Stand Alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:15:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27711230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: Life within the song of waiting for Sam.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: Invisible Boy [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/129525
Comments: 78
Kudos: 269
Collections: Forever Wincest Fest





	when roads disappeared i followed the rivers

**Author's Note:**

> Woke up with this on my fingertips, so I had to write it. I love you all so much. I really do. <3
> 
> (Title from Rise Against. Can 100% be read as a stand alone.)

Time has always been nebulous for Dean. 

Most lives are lived in lines. Dean’s had been stuttered and strange; less of a line and more of an abstract shape, filled with staticky bursts and large gaps missing. It used to terrify him to think of how much he’d missed, how many things he didn’t recall or what vital moments are lost to him forever.

Even now, in forever, he’s aware of time. Even though he’s currently existing within a song, with the windows down and the sun beating in on him through an ever-so hazy windshield, part of him--the part of him that has never truly belonged to him--isn’t here at all.

He feels it. The expanse of Sam’s life. He feels it like a tug in his chest, like his heart is being reshaped, patient and methodic, by relentless hands, to reach Sam. To stay with him.

Even hurts have a strange amount of comfort in them now. Thinking back on the darkest nights he shared with Sam, and the ones they spent apart, have a light shining on them that makes Dean look in on those memories as paragraphs in their story. In the enormous tome of their love; it’s not tragic, none of it is. It’s simply them. Theirs.

What is new here is his awareness of Sam’s side of things, the exact shape of his love and the unending reach of it. He feels it like a warm presence in his side in the car--a profound, total enveloping of Dean. It hits him in waves and all at once: 

_cradled in his arms blanket damp with fear and spittal and blood mashed peas yuck yuck a shared crib with uneven lumps of boy in it protected protected first steps toward Dean Dean Dean true delight kissed dimples playing pirates in couch cushions chasing and being chased in the warmest sunshine small fingers on joysticks in dark arcades for hours upon hours upon Sam cheering on his big brother as he wins level after level piggyback rides and tickle fights and homework checks and new aches in body and heart and seeing himself through Sam’s adolescent eyes knowing the fragile beauty of first love and the low throb of want that grows into something swollen and painful and god he knows now he_ knows _and he understands and he sees the unraveling of Sam’s story and his own presence in it understands how he himself has always made everything so much worse and so much better and how cruel to try and keep them apart to play the valiant knight to Sam’s imagined maiden and trying so desperately to protect an innocence that was never there and that never had a place between them because there’s no room between them for anything or anyone should have known should have given in and given Sam what he needed from the first moment he saw the fire in Sam’s eyes but--_

It passes like a cloud over the sun and he’s left enlightened, his chest and throat and hands on the wheel tight but there’s no room for ache here, no place for regret. Their story belongs to them, messy and frustrating and unfathomably real. No straying from their crooked path would have brought them to where they were that last morning: tangled feet under soft sheets, kisses along sweaty, sinewy shoulders up the most graceful neck with the taste of homemade breakfast in his mouth, the scent of laundry detergent in the air, and the incomparable completeness that Dean only feels inside of Sam while they strain and move together, ever closer.

He would gladly relive each bloody step of his life to always arrive there. Right back there.

The bridge is strangely familiar, and he realizes as soon as he gets out of the car where it reminds him of: that long ago summer in Tennessee, in the Smoky Mountains, a lazy day spent in the river after lunch at a drive-up barbeque shack, the sight of Sam long and warm sprawled on a river rock, his tan deepening in the southern sun, his rare smile only for Dean.

He stares at that rock in the distance for what feels like a whole other eternity, but behind him, everything changes. The page turns, and his shadow isn’t alone where it waits behind him.

Sam is more beautiful than a mortal body could’ve ever conveyed, and the radiance of him is nearly blinding when Dean’s eyes find him again after so long, after just one song.

He tastes of summer, of patiently contained eternal love; there aren’t words for the sorrow and happiness and endless waiting Sam’s lifetime after Dean held, but here, and right now, it spills out of him in helpless, unbridled joy.

Dean grins against his mouth when he tastes Sam’s laugh, and he holds him tighter as Sam nuzzles into his neck and stays there, face hidden where it’s always gone, where he’s always safe. Dean buries his face in Sam’s soft hair and lets himself feel each thread of his jacket, each warm exhalation against his neck, and every constant reminder that this is it. This is forever. And it’s theirs.


End file.
